'John Tognolini has been a rare voice and witness for justice in Australia, chronicling the struggles of Indigenous Australians and veterans and the deceptions of power from behind the facades of a society that prefers not to know. I salute him.'
John Pilger

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Friday, October 05, 2012

John Pilger:The life and death of an Australian hero, whose skin was the wrong colour

Arthur
Murray died the other day. I turned to Google Australia for tributes,
and there was a 1991 obituary of an American ballroom instructor of the
same name. There was nothing in the Australian media. The Australian
newspaper published a large, rictal image of its proprietor, Rupert
Murdoch, handing out awards to his employees. Arthur would have
understood the silence.

I first met Arthur a generation ago and
knew he was the best kind of trouble. He objected to the cruelty and
hypocrisy of white society in a country where his people had lived
longer than human beings had lived anywhere. In 1969, he and Leila had
brought their family to the town of Wee Waa in outback New South Wales
and camped beside the Namoi River. Arthur worked in the cotton fields
for a flat rate of A$1.12 an hour. Only "itinerant blackfellas" were
recruited for such a pittance; only whites had unions in the land of
"fair go". Having not long been granted the vote, the First Australians
were still not counted in the national census - unlike the sheep.

Working
conditions in the cotton fields were primitive and dangerous. "The
crop-sprayers used to fly so low," Arthur told me, "we had to lie face
down in the mud or our heads would've been chopped off. The insecticide
was dumped on us, and for days we'd be coughing and chucking it up." In
1973, a Sydney University study reported its "astounded" finding of fish
floating dead on the surface of the Namoi River, poisoned by the
"utterly mad, uncontrolled" level of spraying, which continued.

Arthur
and the cotton-chippers made history. They went on strike, and more
than 500 of them marched through Wee Waa. The Wee Waa Echo called them
"radicals and professional troublemakers", adding that "it is not
fanciful to see the Aboriginal problem as the powder keg for Communist
aggression in Australia". Abused as "boongs" and "niggers", the Murrays'
riverside camp was attacked and the workers' tents smashed or burned
down.

Although food was collected for the strikers, hunger united
their families. Leila would wake before sunrise to light a wood fire
that cooked the little food they had and to heat a 44-gallon drum, cut
in half lengthways, and filled with water that the children brought in
buckets from the river for their morning bath. With her ancient flat
iron she pressed their clothes, so that they went to school "spotless",
as she would say.

The enemies Arthur and his comrades made were
the Australian equivalent of those standing in the way of Martin Luther
King's civil rights campaigners in the United States. They were the
police, local politicians, the media. "Who in the town was with you?" I
asked Arthur. He thought for a while. "There was a chemist," he said.
"who was kind to Aboriginal people. Mostly we were on our own." Soon
after the cotton workers won an hourly rate of A$1.45, Arthur was
arrested for trespassing in the grounds of the Returned Servicemen's
Club. His defence shocked the town; it was land rights. All of Australia
was Aboriginal land, he said.

On 12 June, 1981, Arthur and
Leila's son, Eddie, aged 21, was drinking with some friends in a park in
Wee Waa. He was a star footballer confident he would be selected to
tour New Zealand with the Redfern All Blacks Rugby League team. At 1.45
pm he was picked up by the police for nothing but drunkenness. Within an
hour he was dead in a cell, with a blanket tried round his neck. At the
inquest, the coroner described police evidence as "highly suspicious"
and their records were found to have been falsified. Eddie, he said, had
died "by his own hand or by the hand of a person or persons unknown".
It was a craven finding familiar to Aboriginal Australians. Everyone
knew Eddie had too much to live for.

Arthur and Leila set out on
an extraordinary journey for justice for their son and their people.
They endured the ignorance and indifference of white society and its
multi-layered political and judicial bureaucracies. They won a royal
commission, only to see the royal commissioner, a judge, suddenly
appointed to a top government administrative job in the critical final
stages of the hearing. They eventually won the right to exhume Eddie's
body, and suffered terribly in the process, in order to prove the true
cause of death, and they proved it; his sternum had been crushed by a
blow while he was alive. And they reaffirmed how common their story was.
"They're killing Aboriginal people," Leila told me. "... just killing
us." Today, Aborigines are imprisoned at five times the rate of blacks
in apartheid South Africa, and their death and suffering in custody is
widespread.

In 2000, the New South Wales Police Minister, Paul
Whelan, met Arthur and Leila in his office in Sydney and ordered an
investigation by a specialist unit, the Police Integrity Commission. He
promised them that this "would not be the end of the road". There was
no serious inquiry and the minister retired to his stud farm. He has
returned none of my calls.

Leila could not read, yet this
remarkable woman memorised almost every document and judgement. She died
in 2004, broken hearted. Incredibly, Arthur reached the age of 70 when
most Aboriginal men are dead by the age of 45. In a typical case this
year, CCTV footage in Alice Springs police station showed a policewoman
cleaning blood off the floor while a stricken Aboriginal man was left to
die. Australia, said Prime Minister Julia Gillard on 26 September,
deserves a seat at the top table of the United Nations because it
"embraces the high ideals" of the UN. No country since apartheid South
Africa has been more condemned by the UN for its racism than Australia.

When
I last saw Arthur, we walked down to the Namoi riverbank and he told me
how the police in Wee Waa were still frightened to go into the cell
where Eddie had died and had pleaded with him to "smoke out" Eddie's
spirit. "No bloody way!" Arthur told them.

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"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction." Graham Greene

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It's been a learning experience for me operating this blog but there is an insatiable hunger for alternative news and opinion on a range of issues in Australia that is often ignored or sidelined by the corporate media and an increasing self censored and Murdoch managed ABC.

Journalists and Writers I Like.

"Bread and work and love, the poor man’s trinity, and by all three needs they chain him down." Christina Stead 1902-1983 Seven Poor Men of Sydney

"Every government is run by liars and nothing should be believed." I.F.Stone 1907-89

"I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult." Arthur Miler 1915-2005

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act." George Orwell 1903-50

"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understandig the hidden agendas of the message that surrounds it." John Pilger

"Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war - for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more." Joesph Heller 1923-99

"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism." Graham Greene 1904-91

"My experience in the First World War and now the Second World War [his son Barney was killed in the Battle of Singapore] changed my outlook on things. It is hard to believe that there is a God. I feel the Bible is a book written by man but for the purpose of preying on a person’s conscience, and to confuse him. Anyone who taken part in a bayonet charge (and I have) [Gallipoli], and has managed to retain his proper senses, must doubt the truth of the Bible and the powers of God, if one exists. And considering the many hundreds of different religions that there are in this world of ours, and the fact that many religions have caused terrible wars and hatreds throughout the world, and that many religions that have hoarded tremendous wealth and property while people inside and outside religion are starving , it is difficult to remain a believer. No Sir, there is no God, it is only a myth." Albert Facey 1894-1982 A Fortunate Life

"Now take my case. I’m twenty-nine and have two brothers—one in the Liberal Party and one serving six years for rape and arson. My sister Peg is on the streets and Dad lives off her earnings. Mum is pregnant by the boarder and because of this Dad won’t marry her. Last night I got engaged to an ex-prostitute and I wish to be fair to her: should I tell her about my brother in the Liberal Party." David Ireland 1927- The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

"Prime Minster Howard I’ve heard You met George Bush and the Pope too, I understand, Oh I liked the Pope much better, I only had to kiss his hand." L’Amour Denis Kevans 1939-2005

"The first law of journalism-to confirm existing prejudice rather than contradict it." Alexander Cockburn

"The Labour Party [ALP], starting with a band of inspired Socialists, degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power, but did not know how to use the power when attained except for the profit of individuals[...] Such is the history of all Labour organisations in Australia, and not because they are Australian , but because they are Labour..." Victor Gordon Childe 1892-1957, How Labour Governs

"The trouble with a free market economy is that it requires so many policemen to make it work." Neal Ascherson, 1932- Games with the Shadows, Policing the Marketplace.

"The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. " Major General Smedley Butler,1881-1940

"What is the crime of robbing a bank compared with the crime of founding one." Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?" Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007

[Battler]" a conscientious person working against many odds to make a living; one whose life is a constant struggle.’ Battlers maybe men or women; black or white. They rarely deal with racism (the negative side of our tradition) because they sympathise with anyone facing adversity or unfair criticism. The term ‘battler’ is a state of mind-a traditional attitude which goes back to the convict era, when the battler was on a flogging to nothing but fiddled around the rules and held his masters in contempt. The battlers are aware that they are being lied to by....politicians; and they suspect that Keating’s warning that Australia could become a banana republic is in fact, happening before their eyes." Frank Hardy 1917-1994. Retreat Australia Fair 1990

I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer. Brendan Behan 1923-64

“I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.” Arundhati Roy